Beginning with his compelling "Brute Force" ('47)followed by the richly atmospheric "Naked City" ('48), Jules Dassin became the hottest dealer in Hollywood of the Film-Noir genre. "Thieves Highway" adds ethnic tensions to the Dassin stew of lost souls always living at the edge of danger. Richard Conte was at his peak here as the tough trucker, quick to throw a punch when he's threatened and equally capable of rolling with them if necessary. In Robert Siodmak's "Cry of the City," he's held in a headlock by a butch Hope Emerson; in this one, a jack gives way and a truck fender lands on his neck....ouch!

Conte, like Burt Lancaster, came from a streetwise background that, second only to a boxing ring, fitted him neatly as a glove when it came to movies like "Thieves Highway." Conte was so good in this, he was selected to repeat the role on TV six years later under the title "Overnight Haul" on the old 20th Century-Fox Hour.

As for Dassin, he had yet a fourth fling at the genre the following year with the claustrophobic thriller, "Night and the City." A film worth commenting on later. As for "Thieves Highway," having seen it, you may want to follow it up with Clouzot"s "Wages of Fear," made three years later and the ultimate truckers' movie. As a boy I was privileged to have seen all four Dassin movies during their original releases. How thrilling to see "Thieves Highway" and "Night and the City" now out on DVD!

Thieves' Highway opens with a view of sunny Fresno, California, a hay cart passing in the foreground—not the setting you'd expect for a film noir. But as this movie shows, the business of transporting and selling fruit and vegetables is as cut-throat and corrosive as any criminal enterprise. Directed by the soon-to-be-blacklisted Jules Dassin and starring left-wing Group Theater veterans Lee J. Cobb and Richard Conte, Thieves' Highway is really an expose of the rotten heart of capitalism; everyone in the movie is obsessed with making a buck. The central symbol is apples: nourishing and wholesome, corrupted when they are equated with money. A Polish farmer, enraged at being paid less than he was promised for his apples, flings boxes of them off a truck, screaming, "Seventy-five cents! Seventy-five cents!" When the truck later runs off the road, careens down a hillside and explodes, there is a haunting, silent image of the scattered apples rolling down the slope. When the hero finds out that money-grubbers have gone out to collect the dead trucker's load and sell it, he begins kicking over crates of apples, fuming, "Four bits a box!"

The hero is Nick Garcos, a navy veteran who returns home to find that his Greek immigrant father has lost both legs in a trucking accident caused by a crooked produce dealer named Mike Figlia. Bent on revenge, Nick teams up with a trucker named Ed to haul the season's first Golden Delicious apples to San Francisco, where he'll be able to track down Figlia. There's an evocative montage sequence of the grueling overnight drive, at the end of which Nick arrives at the produce market, already bustling before daybreak. Figlia spots him and immediately plans to cheat him as he did his father. He hires a local prostitute, Rica, to distract Nick while he steals his load. Meanwhile Ed, having trouble with his truck, is still hours away. Figlia's plans go awry when Rica falls for Nick, and Nick turns out to be tougher and quicker on the uptake than his father. Prone to issuing threats such as, "Gyp me and I'll cut your heart out," he squeezes fair payment out of Figlia and excitedly calls his girl-next-door fiancée to meet him so they can get married, despite his obvious attraction to Rica. Nice girl Polly turns out to be even more interested in money than the prostitute. Figlia's methods turn increasingly violent, leading to a showdown with Nick in a roadhouse.

Most of Thieves' Highway was filmed on location in Frisco's produce market and nearby waterfront, gritty and vibrant settings bustling with trucks and pushcarts and shouting men, dripping produce, ashcan fires, crowded diners and seedy bars. The film's acting has the same visceral naturalism, from Lee J. Cobb's crass, blustery, hypocritical thug to Millard Mitchell's tough-as-nails trucker. Richard Conte brings a stunning physicality to his role as a hot-headed yet intelligent man who is easily the world's most elegant truck driver. He uses his intense gaze and graceful movements to charismatic effect and reacts to his surroundings with vivid sensuality. The high point and heart of the movie are the sexy scenes between Nick and Rica. Often confined in her small bedroom, they circle each other warily, alternating between barbed hostility and explosive passion. During their first kiss, they look a few seconds away from getting into serious trouble with the Hays Office. When Nick initially resists her advances, Rica taunts him, "What's the matter, don't you like girls?" "Sure I like girls," he replies, "I always wished I had a kid sister, wearing pigtails down to here…You were somebody's kid sister once." Escaping from the cliché of the whore with a heart of gold, Valentina Cortese is a mercurial blend of playfulness, hurt and defiance. She displays open lust for Conte—digging her nails into his bare chest, rubbing her dark curls in his face—that is rare for the forties. Contrary to the pattern in many noirs, in Thieves' Highway lust does not corrupt, as greed does. It belongs with the life-affirming, humane side of the movie: with Nick's warm and loving immigrant parents, with Ed's unexpected decency when he saves Nick's life after a roadside accident, with the beautiful vision of the Polish farmer's orchard and its bounty of fresh golden apples.

Richard Conte plays a hot head recently returned from the Navy, who jumps in on a business deal out of personal vengeance when he finds out that a crooked produce dealer (played in a characteristically tiresome performance by Lee J. Cobb) not only cheated his father, but also caused him to lose use of his legs in an auto accident. He teams up with Millard Mitchell (giving a wonderfully gruff performance) to deliver a load of apples to Cobb in San Francisco. But Conte finds out that the dirty dealings surrounding the produce market in the big city are plentiful, and he and Cobb begin a cat and mouse game to see who can swindle who. And just to complicate matters, an enigmatic gamine (played by Valentina Cortese) shows up and takes a hankering to Conte. Is she playing him straight, or is she part of the whole corrupt mess?

Director Jules Dassin uses the rather mundane premise -- delivering a load of apples to a fruit market -- to frame a haunting and striking chronicle of one man's nightmare journey from the cosy confines of small-town America to the jangling, sinister and shadowy worlds of its urban jungles. **POSSIBLE SPOILERS AHEAD** Though Dassin gives us a happy ending, it's a qualified one. After all, Conte turns his back on his devoted girl and his family to join the denizens of the city, and chooses the allure of the "worldy" vamp over that of the pristine virgin. In an America shaken up by WWII and desperately wanting to believe in the white picket American dream, this bitter pill of a film suggests that that dream isn't for everyone.

With Jack Oakie and Joseph Pevney as a pair of rival apple sellers, who bring some nice shading to their supporting plot line.

Grade: A